Thomas Gray's Sensibility and the Sublimity of Reserve

Gray as Late Augustan
Gray’s voraciously eclectic reading tastes and literary experiments are well-known; 
from his early interest in Dante and Tasso to his later exploration of Erse and Norse poetry, he 
has long been recognised as a significant figure of the shifts in critical attitudes that took place 
from the mid-eighteenth century onwards (see for instance Van Tieghem I: 131-7). Even his 
proficiency as a Hellenist, reflected in the allegedly obscure Pindarics of “The Progress of 
Poesy,” has been seen as a significant extension of Augustan habits of reference (Whalley in 
Downey & Jones 148-50). Yet these tastes and experiments remained, for much of his career 
at least, firmly grounded in a Neoclassical literary ethos. Gray’s first Latin composition at 
Eton was closely patterned on the 
Essay on Man 
(Gray 1969,
 
290-3, Mack 137-9). The 
correspondence with West and Walpole repeatedly pits the amicable worship of Virgil and 
Horace against the scholastic aridity of the Universities’ curricula, in a broadly Scriblerian 
vein that Gray would again tap in the unfinished “Hymn to Ignorance,” with its clear 
indebtedness to the 
Dunciad 
(Gray 1969,
 
74-77). And if the admiration for Pope evinced by 
these early letters is hardly surprising in a young man of the late 1730s, it nevertheless 
suggests a determined allegiance to “Ancient” principles at a time when new directions had 
emerged in British poetry, from Aaron Hill to Thomson’s 
Seasons
(which Gray esteemed and 
sometimes echoed, but seldom mentioned; he thought its moralising “verbose,” Gray 1935,
 
III: 1291). More tellingly, perhaps, the early tastes of the Gray-Walpole coterie allowed for a 
modicum of Francophilia that not only made French romances acceptable from a hedonistic 
standpoint (see
 
Gray 1935,
 
I: 192 for his wish to “read eternal new romances of Marivaux and 
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Crebillon”), but also extended to more austere authors like Boileau and La Bruyère, both of 
whom are mentioned in Gray’s humorous transcript of a conversation between books in his 
study, with the latter also appearing in the epistle in which West exhorts him to “[t]ake Plato 
down, take Tully, take Bruyére” (
sic
) (Gray 1935, I: 94, 97). We know, moreover, that Gray’s 
only foray into dramatic writing, the 
Agrippina 
begun in 1742, was partly prompted by his 
admiration for Racine’s 
Britannicus 
(Gray 1969,
 
27; Gray 1935, I: 108-9, 262, 369). Such a 
literary background makes it reasonable to think that Gray’s notorious reluctance to produce 
and publish was not just determined by his gentlemanly aspirations and antipathy towards the 
rising commercial public sphere, as historicist readings have emphasised (Kaul; Guillory 107-
24), but also informed by a peculiarly intransigent kind of Neoclassical critical attitude. They 
can partly be seen, in other words, as stemming literally from the Horatian ideal of patient 
elaboration reasserted by Boileau (“Vingt fois sur le métier remettez votre ouvrage,” 231) and 
Pope (“Keep your Piece nine years,” 599), made even more stringent by something like La 
Bruyère’s notion of a “point de perfection” in art (La Bruyère 83), or his sharp distinction 
between merely beautiful and truly perfect works.
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Indeed, and although Gray himself seems 
to have worked through outbursts of concentration rather than regular polishing, the 
composition of the